Daniel Scott White

"Let me stretch your mind to speculate a whole lot more. Consider the possibilities of quantum fiction..."

So says the editor in his "Overture" to this fine collection of stories; and stretch your mind he will. Each of these stories make us reconsider what reality is like, or to consider what it could be like with just a little twist, one little step away from the normal.

Daniel Scott White has encouraged some very well-known authors to contribute stories which fit these themes. David Brin, for example, asks us to imagine co-existing but competing timeframes, each running at a radically different rate in his story "The River of Time".

Robert Silverberg's classic "To See the Invisible Man", on the other hand, takes a humane look at a society which can exclude wrongdoers utterly from participation in the community, from normal life. What would it be like to suffer such exclusion? Though written some years ago, long before 'social media' was a thing, Silverberg's story seems particularly relevant today in our hyper-connected society.

Of the several other stories in the book, I particularly liked Emily Davenport's "Alternate Universe Ernies" in which the protagonist, a talk-radio host, begins to regularly encounter a weird twist in spacetime when she goes to pick up her husband from the school where he teaches. Every so often, she ends up somewhere... different.

I also liked Jerry Olton's "In the Garden, a Late Flower Blooms", a nice exploration of alternate realities. In this case a woman gets lost in her own garden, her retired husband's pride and joy. Instead of finding him, to her consternation she ends up in a world just slightly different from her own.

The term "quantum leap" is often misunderstood. It does not mean making a huge jump from one thing to another very different thing. Rather it means the opposite: it is the smallest possible change which can be made in the state of an atom. The key point is that it is a sudden jump (of an electron, say) from one location to another without passing through any intermediate location or state. Properly understood, then, the term "quantum leap" could apply to many of the stories in this collection as they tease us with minor but highly consequential shifts in our view of reality.

I'm looking forward to seeing what future issues of this new magazine have to offer.… (plus d'informations)